As DROD.net is going to be strictly non-commercial, we probably won't have any special areas for paid-up members on the site. The most knowledgeable, experienced players will have a paid-up copy of the game, and so we'd essentially be creating a secret club away from the unwashed masses, which means that those experienced players will probably spend a lot of time there.
The problem is that those unwashed masses will miss out on any neat non-DROD conversations we'd have in there. They wouldn't get as much of a chance to get to know the rest of the experienced players, which means we can't flash 'em our best grin and win them over, and maybe even get them to register themselves. And a critical part of the Plan (capital P) is that there's lots of user holds so that everyone can get some lovely DROD action, and dividing up the forum seems to make that a more difficult goal.
That, and it's a slippery slope. When we've got one forum for subscribers only, why not have, say, an Architecture forum where we can expand upon the plot in the story? And a Holds forum where those holds go? We'd have two forums for everything, and we've got, what, 30 active members? We'd chop that in half so that we could have spoilers.
Or, seeing as we're all such great people around here, we could just use secret tags or make veiled references. I figure that people who want to have it spoiled will go look in the Hints and Solutions board, or will piece together what happens in the story from fragments of every conversation on the board. In any case, we probably won't be able to ensure that all of our secrets stay a secret for very long, so why put up barriers to try to prevent what will inevitably happen anyway, if they'll also introduce class (the I've-got-more-money-than-you sense, not the stylish sense) into the forum?
Although the Secret Shiny New Thing Erik was talking about may be of interest to this issue. But only tangentially, and if any of you know how random I can be, you know that sheep could be considered tangential to this issue.
What I've been trying to work out is how I can replicate the information of KDD for JtRH, and what's safe and unsafe to write about. Is the level information safe? The monsters? Heck, how about the Eighth article? How much of that should I expand on?
Incidentally, we do have a couple of hidden forums, but rest assured there's a very good reason why they're private access only. And no, it's not so we can make snide comments behind people's backs. There's very little you'd find interesting on there anyways, now, apart from historical stuff, and I love waxing lyrical about the historical stuff.
Matt
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